About 70 percent of Ukraine’s population uses Telegram as their main source of news, but the government is worried that the app is being used as a method of disinformation and spying by Russia. They are trying to pivot to apps like Signal instead, but it is difficult to break the habit of such a majority of the country.
whether telegram was setup as a honeypot or got taken over or somehow is still independent and free of nation-state influence is a) beyond the expertise of any and all participants ITT and b) besides the point.
the main point is telegram’s honcho when faced with the perfectly valid question (E2EE when?) throwing out one smoke screen after the other, removed noone asked or cared about and conflating unrelated crap to spread FUD - signal is CIA backed, whatsapp turns over metadata, all crypto is blown by NSA so we’re better off without, we can’t have encrypted channels (no1 axed for that), etc.
if he’s being cagey and lying about plainly evident things, what else is he untruthful about?
there are FOSS telegram clients out there and adding on E2EE is trivial (remember Pidgin and OTR over Google’s XMPP?). the fact that that’s explicitly against telegram’s TOS and that they’re adamant about leaving all your removed unencrypted “in the cloud” draws but one conclusion.